The Cross and His love that Persist

               Where to begin?  It has been “a long one,” in more ways than one, since I last posted something.  What has temporarily hushed “my muse”?   A trip to Alabama to see our newest grandchild, Miss Mason, with a side trip to Monroeville, Harper Lee’s hometown and the model for To Kill a Mockingbird (oh, yes, there will be a future post on this), and more frustrated waiting, in part, on the results of blood tests, one not previously done and the discovery this past week that of the two faxes sent for this set of tests in early February, only one was performed and, of course, not for the “new” test.  You get the picture.  Thank God His love does persist, just like this blog title claims.

               And speaking of love, there is no more powerful expression of real, sacrificial love than Christ’s death on the cross.  Paul expresses this so well when he states, “But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8).  I continue to grow in my understanding of this, and interestingly, our trip to Alabama and a verse I read just this morning have “watered” this growth.  Previously, I have seen that on the cross, Jesus gave up all of His human ability to accomplish anything.  He entrusted Himself fully to God and the good but so very difficult path God had revealed to Him about His earthly journey. 

               Just this morning, I read in a devotional:  “And Jesus cried again with a loud voice, and yielded up His spirit” (Mat. 27:50).  I noticed the small “s” in the word spirit.  I checked my own Bible, and there, too, it was lower case.  Other places, like in John 14, the references to spirit as the Holy Spirit are capitalized, so this is about Jesus, the man, who struggled in the Garden of Gethsemane in His very real humanness to fully yield to God’s revealed plan and God’s revealed way of great suffering, death and resurrection to save us all.    

               In a birthday bag from Mason and her parents was a simple cross about 8 x 4 inches made of two rough, brown, metal nails.  Our daughter-in-law kindly said that David, our son, had picked out this part of the bag’s contents.  Just today, I hung it next to a collection of various styles and sizes of crosses that stretches along a wall in our hallway.  I had gotten the idea to create this display after seeing something similar at a neighbor’s house.

               Also while with Mason’s family, we visited a very old Methodist church on that Sunday.   Clearly, we were in “the right place at the right time” all through the service.   In the very stirring message on Nicodemus’s “secret” visit to Jesus, the pastor introduced the story of Cardinal Ignatius Kung, imprisoned in China for about 30 years beginning in 1955.  He had no materials, no visitors, absolutely nothing but his secret writing on rice paper, A Meditation on the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ.  Then moving us toward the cross, its message and its continued call to us, the choir sang the first three verses of a hymn, “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross,” written in 1707 by Isaac Watts.  The congregation then stood to sing the final stanza ending with these words:

Love so amazing, so divine,
Demands my soul, my life, my all.

               In Alabama, all across our country and all around the world, in the message and the power of the cross God continues to draw us, to save us, to encourage us that He and He alone can still take our sins and the worst of life situation’s and bring forth new and wonderful illustrations of God’s amazingly powerful grace—for you and for me.  His love does persist.  Thank God.